The first thing Tabitha Brownstone wants us to know about Gator Face is that it plays. Loudly.
“It was so exciting. I really loved seeing how the audience responded to it,” she says. The kills worked. The alligator material worked. Then people laughed. “There was actually some moments that people were laughing out loud at jokes that I didn’t know would hit so hard. But I guess when something is so serious you need those moments of levity.”
That is the register Padraig Reynolds is working in. Gator Face follows friends whose Florida vacation collapses into a swamp-bound fight against a cult that feeds its victims to alligators in the name of an ancient reptilian god. Brownstone plays Claire, alongside Amariah Dionne, Scot Scurlock, Ella Mosca and Nikolas Kolasinski in the title role. This is not a tasteful modern horror film, and it is not trying to be.
She could see the movie before she read it
Reynolds described the film to her before she had the full screenplay, and that did most of the convincing. “He was so specific in how he communicated his vision to me,” she says. “He had the ideas in his head already for the shots that he wanted.” Then the script arrived and matched the pitch.
“It was really all there on the page,” she says, describing a page-turner descriptive enough that she could see the images. On set he told the actors what he wanted, then let them bring their own version of it.
Finding Claire inside a grindhouse movie
Brownstone is clear-eyed about what this is. Gator Face is action-driven rather than character-driven, and she points to the gold standard for making that work anyway.
“I love The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the first one of course. And those people really have relationships with each other and you can tell, but that’s not what is necessarily driving the project.”
She arrived knowing who Claire was and how she related to everyone. What she did not anticipate was the schedule. The film was shot almost entirely in story order, so the cast lost people in sequence.
“If someone gets eaten by an alligator, they’re gone for the rest of the shoot,” she says. “It did feel sad, you know.”
Reynolds was handling so much of this independent production himself, scheduling included, that he simply shot it in page order.
The director got in the water first
He also would not ask the cast to do anything he had not done himself. If Brownstone had to run a field, he walked it first. When the actors went into the swamp, he went in too.
“He was in the water with us the whole time,” she says. “Whatever we needed, he’s right there.” If someone raised a concern, the answer was to stop.
She also reports a Florida shoot with almost no Florida problems. They filmed in September, inside hurricane season, and it rained roughly once. She braced for a summer of bites and got about one mosquito. She laughs about it.
About those alligators
Here is the detail worth pinning down, because Gator Face has been marketed hard on real animals and no CGI. Both are true, and Brownstone was never standing beside a live alligator.
“For better or worse, I was actually never around any live alligators,” she says. That footage was shot after principal photography wrapped, at a Florida sanctuary with a trainer on hand, then composited into the shots. Publicity has named the partner as Bellowing Acres, a North Florida sanctuary for rescued gators.
What the cast worked with was a puppet. “On set what we had was a puppet alligator that they would jump into the water and move with their body, and that’s what’s biting.”
So the animals are real, the gore is practical, and nobody was in the water with a predator. Is it hard to look terrified of a puppet? She does not oversell it: “If you did the homework, it’s easier than you’d think.”
The strangest problem was more Floridian. During night shoots, bugs swarmed the lights in such volume that the lights cut out. The fix was a crew member with a little fan.
What comedy taught her about terror
Brownstone came up through stand-up, improv and live performance, and credits it with making her a steadier screen actor. “As long as you fully believe whatever situation you’re in, the audience will back you up.”
She resists the tidy version, where comedy and horror are secretly the same muscle. “For me, every job is different,” she says. “I look at every character and how I can have an in-road through really relating to that character and having empathy for them.”
For the fear, the location did some of the work. “It is freaking scary, you know.”
Nobody is going to give you permission
Brownstone started acting as a kid, playing young Domino in Tony Scott’s Domino, and says she landed among adults who let her keep her own instincts. She has kept that going since: acting, producing, writing, embroidery, bass, languages.
“Creativity comes in all different aspects of life,” she says. “That’s what makes me feel alive personally.”
That is also the thinking behind her comedy web series Fickle, the shorts she wrote and starred in, and the features now in early development. She is direct about the trap she sees artists fall into.
“No one’s going to give you permission to be yourself, no one’s going to give you permission to be creative and live your best life.”
More bluntly: “I think it is really harmful for artists to wait for permission to make their art.”
When I raised the risk, that going independent means no backing and real financial exposure, she gave the cleanest answer of our conversation.
“There’s a risk in everything. You’ve got to bet on yourself.”
A cult classic in her heart already
Next she would like to go psychological horror that leaves people questioning how they look at their lives. She has a project in that vein in development and is not saying more yet.
She is not waiting on a verdict for this one. “This is a cult classic in my heart already,” she says, praising the photography, the cast, the score and a title that is hard to lose with. Asked what she wants audiences carrying out about Claire: “She runs so fast.”
Her favorite horror film is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the original. Which tracks. That is the same sweaty, made-by-hand energy she keeps describing in Gator Face, right down to a director in the water with his actors because there was nobody else to do it.
Gator Face opens in select theaters on September 11, 2026, arrives on Digital and VOD on September 15, 2026, and gets a physical release on October 13, 2026, from Epic Pictures and Dread.
